Yeah, a bit disappointing. The rumor was that we’d get a repeat of the Pathfinder bundle with Kobold Press stuff, but this is Kobold with Frog God, Troll Lord, Necrotic Gnome, and Nord Games.
Bundle sites are prioritizing OGL 5e stuff because of the reasonable worry that they might not be viable once the new OGL hits.
There is some nice B/X stuff in there, along with Old School Essentials to run it as well as Castles & Crusades, which has been mentioned around the traps as a fine D&D alternative.
I also expect various follow up bundles for completely non-5E stuff in due course.
I mean, I bought it, just to support the devs, and there are a few platform agnostic books, as well as some OSE stuff.
So weird, given how strongly Baker stressed that PbtA was a design philosophy and not an actual system framework in his lengthy but intriguing blog series on the topic.
That said, I’m here for some official from-the-mouth-of-god support on this topic, given that I’m slightly devving a game in that system :D
What is an SRD?
Systems Reference Document!
It might be the case that D&D had the first substantial one released in coordination with the original OGL back in the 3E days, or maybe someone predated that, unsure. In any case, different publishers take it to mean different things, but the general basics are:
- Convey basic game rules of how to play a given TTRPG in an accessible (usually online) format
- Likely include content necessary to make characters (albeit perhaps not all options, e.g. stuff from expansions/splatbooks)
- Possibly include content necessary to GM the game (e.g., monsters, items), but again likely leaving off material beyond the basics
- Maybe include details on legally expanding the contents of the SRD in 3rd party products for free or maybe sale (may include licensing info)
My favorite SRD these days is the one for Fate by Evil Hat – https://fate-srd.com/
They are very, erm, full-featured, basically transcribing the bulk of the rules text from the main Fate books - the original Core rulebook, the faster-to-play Accelerated rules, the newly minted and refined Condensed rules, and even some of the Fate Toolkits that provide details on how to customize the game and some of the Worlds of Fate setting books.
While their SRD doesn’t feature art or some of the example text from the sample campaigns, it’s honestly pretty comprehensive and very searchable/hotlinked together.
In the case of Baker’s stab at a PbtA SRD, it could really wind up being almost anything – a more structured step-by-step guide to thinking through his and Meguey’s design philosophy en route to developing your own game system, perhaps, or maybe a structured stripped-down basic system incorporating some of his preferred expressions of PbtA.
Stupid Rules Document
He specifically says an Apocalypse World SRD, which I think is probably a bit different than trying to encapsulate “PBTA” (which as you say, he’s always insisted is a design philosophy). What that ends up looking like I still couldn’t tell ya.
Call of Cthulhu reigns supreme in South Korea. (Follow up article to the news that it is the #1 western TTRPG in Japan.)
Roll20 told Polygon that 20% of Call of Cthulhu users play in a language other than English. That’s double the rate of other systems. In particular, 10% of Cthulhu players play in Korean, versus less than 1% for other systems.
“When I look for players on social media, the male-female ratio is about 1:1,” Suisho said. “I would have no trouble in gathering players for a female-only game, at least when it’s online. I’m not sure about the current offline situation, as I haven’t been to such events for two or three years.”
Kim also estimates that over half of the players in South Korea are women, and attendance at a small convention Dayspring Games hosted in 2019 was over 70% women.
Kobold Press released the first bit of their “Project Black Flag” playtest. This is supposed to be their open solution to the threat of WotC yanking everything for One D&D.
It’s like One D&D as far as it being a piecemeal rollout that they promise will be “backwards compatible” with 5e. Community reaction so far is so-so. The sample is a little too small to really judge what the full system will be like and it seems people are lukewarm on the idea of “just another D&D clone” when Pathfinder 2e is right over there.
Huge expansion for Evil Hat’s Monster of the Week crowdfunding now. EH are generally excellent on Kickstarters, with extremely fast turnaround and very high quality. Great Powered By the Apocalypse Supernatural-alike game.
I have no doubt Colville’s project will be successful. He’s got a large set of fans and they’re all in on his Patreon anyway.
For me, it’s a pass until it’s done and I see what its all about. The little bit where he talked about how armor might work didn’t sound all that compelling to me.
Look, all you need to calculate is what you would need to hit armor class 0! So simple.
Colville seems like a fun guy but he likes D&D a lot more than I do so I don’t expect an RPG he makes to be my cup of tea.
I need you to know that I laughed out loud.
I also wish Colville luck with his system, just like with Kobold Press’s Project Black Flag, and even D&D’s One playtest, but between PF2 and LU! and Numenera and (etc.), my brainspace is rapidly overflowing while my wallet is rapidly draining. How many players will hop onto the major factions in the post-OGL diaspora?
I think this is going to be a lot like Twitter. Everyone agrees the brand name product is a shitshow due to leadership, but no one really has the gumption to get off. Some folks will migrate to other systems, but they’ll be the minority until/unless D&D implodes.
Free League just slipped this into their “2023 portfolio” announcement:
The Walking Dead Universe RPG - Soon on Kickstarter!
Starts March 14.